I’m honestly feeling like the Mercy equivalent of a Reddit Lucio now. Flying around all these corners and bouncing off a bunch of walls and map objects.
My old setting was Prefers Beam Target: Off.
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I love the new setting and quite honestly never expected them to actually include it in the game.
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It’s pretty nice. I’ve always had it prefer the beam target, and I never wanted to give up the cool techs that come with that. The only downside was having to briefly detach the beam in order to fly to someone else, which the new setting resolves.
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I’m already so used to the prefer beam target that I can’t be bothered using the new mode 
I can definately appreciate it’s existence though, I can tell this is a big deal.
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I have found myself a bit annoyed at flying to an unexpected target but it honestly makes Mercy even more fun to play lol, that tiny bit of random event that you can undo in 1 second or so
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I’ve used beam prefers ga on for 500hrs.
Being able to have the freedom of movement while still having the benefits of ga’ing wherever my beam is attached feels pretty amazing. But also sometimes overwhelming because I have much more freedom in positioning and I’m not 100% sure anymore where I should be going because I don’t need to break and reattach beams anymore. I keep forgetting to reclick to attach beam to a new target because I want to keep the beam on my last target for a while longer.
It felt pretty sweet dodging enemy soldier fire and winston jumping on me on top of hollywood when I was doing team dm though. Having mobile teammates on high ground and spread out makes an insane difference in mobility with this setting and increasing beam uptime at the same time.
I did have to lower guardian angel sensitivity though, to prevent accidentally flying to targets, as I’m very used to just looking at the fight around me and my teammates and pressing ga whenever I needed to and breaking the beam.
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I already had my GA sensitivity lowered quite a bit as I’m used to playing with prefer beam target off, but I found the new setting to still be convenient when my team is particularly bunched up - now instead of trying to thread the needle I can simply flick away to go where I need to and avoid the short flight (and wasted GA cooldown) to the target right in front of me
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I need to get used to not looking at my teammates when I want to ga past them to my beam target, otherwise I will get caught up in the mass lol. Because I’ve always used to just ga to my beam target and not have to care that there’s lots of people in my way.
I tried doing that, but like I found that I was so used to breaking beam + flicking back where necessary to re-attach and looking around a lot that it somewhat defeated the point of the setting most of the time 
so I just reverted back to prefer beam. there are times whereby the detach of beam does register quick enough and I’m like “the new setting would’ve got me where I wanted to” but honestly I think that’s more of a hardware thing on my side because I’m literally playing with a potato pc (old cpu, literally rely on intel graphics not a dedicated gpu, etc.).
I’m also using a potato cpu, but I’d still say that the new setting is vastly superior to anything we’ve had so far. Just gotta power through some old mindset and keep at it and consciously think about your beam and ga usage and it’ll come to you in time. And always warm up with these in mind too.
As someone from the other end of it, I struggle with old habits, too - I’m used to being able to pre-emptively hold down shift to GA as soon as somebody comes within range or peeks around a corner.
And now I accidentally fly backwards when I do that
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It’s definitely the best setting by far, it should honestly be the new default setting for Mercy.
Not using it is putting yourself at such an insane disadvantage for 0 reason.
Using it with mobile heroes on your team like Pharah, Echo, or Genji is soooo nice.
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That would be because the new setting seems to have some lag when it comes to registering new GA target, probably because it’s not getting the reticle fast enough, so frame perfect ga’s aren’t gonna work unless detaching beams. But we’re also training ourselves NOT to detatch beams… so it’s slightly problematic lol.
I disagree. Prefer Beam Target is, I think, still the best guardian angel setting. I played with Prefer Facing Target (initially thinking it was going to be an overall buff) but realized it was only a buff to those who played with Facing Target Only.
I am used to being able to super-jump off my beam target when my teammates are grouped very close together. This is beneficial for avoiding ultimates like Earth Shatter. It’s easy with Prefer Beam Target. I didn’t like having to back up more than necessary without it. I don’t always have that extra time to back up.
Another thing I noticed with this new setting was an excessive amount of refunded guardian angels. I would GA a small distance then be pushed backwards and not given a GA cooldown. This would happen at least once every game, but I never had this issue normally and it has gotten me killed at least once.
Maybe I haven’t fully realized this new setting’s potential but for the mean time I’m just going to stick with Prefer Beam Target.
Yep, I noticed this as well.
I wish the setting would work as intended but GA is being very buggy as this moment.
Since serenity uses toggle ga off, it’s hard to say if he manually cancelled ga here or not. But it looks… jankier than normal, so I assumed it was buggy.
I didn’t realize how much I needed this setting until I tried it. My Mercy gameplay has improved a lot.
I’m putting some clips of bugs I see happening in bug section and pray blizz sees it because new ga setting is not completely usable and as fluid as the old one without fixing lot of the issues.
It looks like they manually cancelled GA as indicated by the 2 second cooldown but it did look a bit janky. I could be wrong.
I asked and yea it was a cancellation.
But I did collect some actual bugged interactions with the new ga in the bug thread I made.